A massacre!

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Don't confuse technology with politics in all matters. Technology is providing species intermix that never occurred before. Species have conflicted since species evolved. The process continues inevitably and it is rough on some and easy on others. That's the way the world works.

Yes, changes occur, and have always occured, but ones of the magnitude we're causing generally occur over geological timescales. The last time the continents were linked was back in the Triassic over 200 million years ago. Today, although not physically linked, to all intents and purpose they are by the air and sea vehicles of humanity. I only have to walk a mile to the local shops to see an array of non-indigenous species from grey squirrels to oilseed rape.

To add to that, to say "species intermix" without qualification is misleading, Sand. Intermix occurs with inevitable extinction of certain of the intermixed.

Lol European honey bee or honey bees as they are more commonly called are found in countries across the globe. They colonised the world way before Asian hornets came to Europe. They actually originated in Eastern Africa and then spread to Europe.

Get your facts right. Many bees don't produce honey. If they do, they can be too aggressive to cultivate (although it is sometimes possible to collect the honey). The vast majority of honey production comes from what we called "honey bees" aka European.

Hornets and other wasps are not their biggest threat, Colony Collapse Disorder is. In general hornets and wasps are considered a good thing because they prey on things that are considered pests.

Ecosystems can be fragile however there is not such thing as the balance of nature. That is a myth that was shown to be false a long time ago. Nature is chaos.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_of_nature

Animals could give a f**k about nationalities or borders, or continents.

Seriously it is worse that those complaining that eagle owls aren’t British, even thought there is evidence that shown that hey have been here for centauries. All because people don't want their domestic cat to get taken once in a blue moon. As if domestic cats are somehow more British.

And how did they get there? Human beings took them there. I assume when that happened indigenous species suffered, too. Possibly some are now extinct. Then there's the guy who crossed African honey bees with European ones. The "Africanised" bees subsequently escaped in S America, and are currently colonising N America at the expense of the European honey bee the Yanks use for honey production and pollination.

We're talking about Asian hornets, that are distinct from the European ones. Asian hornets are 2" long and will go through a hive of bees in a few hours. CCD is a general term for a phenomenon without a known cause, as far as I'm aware. In the UK the specific threats to bees are varroa, AFB and EFB, from what I've read. Most of those are imported problems.

That is true. But humans transport organisms much further than the organisms could get by themselves. There are all sorts of nasty things carried in the bilges of ships, for example and there is the most efficient disease vector of all - the jet plane.

The Black Death Plague was carried from Asia to Europe on ships. The ships carried the rats and the fleas that infested them, far and wide. The rest is history.

Even when the organism carried is not a pathogen, by placing it in an environment where it did not co-evolved with the local fauna and flora one can get disastrous invasions. Look at the weeds choking the waterways of Florida, for example. They were brought in on ships. Also there is a specie of snake which is doing a number on the animal ecology of Florida in the swamp areas. The snakes were brought in from the outside.

And then, of course, there were the aborted attempts of humans to produce better breeds than nature. The Gypsy Moth which has killed half the maple trees in New England is the result of an abortive attempt to breed the Chinese Silk Worm with the local caterpillars. And there is the famous African Bee disaster which originated in South America. These miserable creatures have worked their way north to the Southern U.S..

ruveyn

honey bees originated in Asia. Fossils in Europe are millions years older then humans themselves. There is a fossil record of a North American honey bee 14 million years old.

So your assumption is flawed.

Not really. You need to distinguish between different species, and sub-species. Honey bees used for honey production in N America and Europe are mainly strains of the domesticated European species, as far as i'm aware. It may have had origins far off, but it didn't arrive here (Europe) originally over night in a shipping container. It would have been a slow process influenced by massive changes in climate over dozens of glacial/ interglacial cycles spanning vast tracts of time.

Errr there is a direct path out of africa which would have been easier for bees to cross than it was for humans.

There is simply is no reason to assume european honey bees could have only got here becuase of humans.

well no, how's about I base my world-view on some kind of evidence based approach? ascan made a statement that immigrants had colonised europe and were destroying the european way of life. I challenged the truth-value of what he said, bearing in mind that all the evidence available to me at this time contradicts ascan's statement in the fullest possible sense, in fact that it was so absurd that that there would be no evidence at all. I don't require a bunch of links nor did I ask for any, just one iota of evidence that would support the statement ascan made from a remotely reputable source. I am more than aware that every political organisation makes it case through a propaganda organ. My problem with the BNP website is that it along with other groups have a long, long history of not presenting any evidence and I am yet to see any reason to beliee they have in any way changed; instead they simply makes assertions at best if not outright fabrications. I barely got past the prattle about the popularity of the name Muhammed in the Telegraph article which told me nothing to support his statement.



well he was part of the tendency, so it may just be that he was a trotskyist, if you pardon my sarcasm. I don't know all that much about him so I'm afraid I miss the point.

This is getting a bit confused. Look, let's define a point or two, first: "here" now refers to UK, part of Europe. "Honey bee" refers to the various species of bee that produce honey. Adding "European" to "honey bee" defines a range of sub-species indigenous to Europe.

The European honeybee would have been domesticated a long time back. It would have been bred to select for production of honey volume, and for a generally docile disposition. This bee was then transported in the 1600s to N America where there are no indigenous honey bees. The fact that one may have been found as a fossil millions of years old in N America does not prove they've been there in the last 10k years. "Africanised" bees are a cross between African honey bees, and European ones. They are very aggressive and are currently displacing the European honey bee across the south of N America. This was the result of an experiment that went wrong. It's well documented.

So, stepping back in time, the question is how did the European honey bee evolve from the African or Asian varieties? I expect that happened far enough back to have had no human interference. The climate across Europe has varied significantly, even over the last 10k years. That opens paths for migration (the specific ranges of temperature, humidity, food supply etc a certain organism needs to reproduce and expand its population) then closes them.

Yes, but like I said, there I no such thing as the balance of nature. We can't suddenly exclude ourselves from nature nor are we responsible for everything. The domestication of bees is relatively recent.

Some things happen gradually in nature and some thing happen abruptly. When it happens abruptly it is not always the fault of humans.

The fact is European honey bees could have travelled to Europe on they own. The could have feasibly crossed the difficult conditions of Northern Africa and the Middle East in a more efficient way than humans. Humans merely bided their time and left and the best possible conditions and at that stage they were not developed enough to carry bees for long distances.

The fact is there is no are easy answers in ecology, a lot of it is personal choice and nostalgia.

Hey Ruveyn! Regarding the killer bees, i had watched a doc regarding the whole enterprise, it was a major screw up =/ . Mostly because an American entrepreneur had noticed that the African killer bees made more honey than our docile honey bees. He tried to cross them to have his breed of docile, higher producing kind of bee. But during their stay in South America it seems one of his "apprentice" or whatever opened the cage (which was keeping the queen inside, kind of why i propose the last idea) and the queens and their colony flew away... Spreading north and up to California (like you said). And what's worse, it's been said that even though there are crosses with the european honey bee, they still remain aggressive. =(

I can see where any species can circle a continent slowly over time, migrate from continent to continent, providing there is a significant enough land bridge. The trouble for any body of land, the U.S. and perhapse the U.K. with having many miles of water between themselves and the next body of land at their closest point - for the U.S. its definitely feasible to say that anything that is not indigenous to the Americas, North or South, we brought in some way shape or form - deliberately or not. Great Britain, I know the English Channel is much narrower than the Atlantic Ocean, maybe a stray bee or two could fly that distance but for something that small which for all intents and purposes would really only be going so many miles from its nest radius to find pollen - it still seems a little out there conceptually.

Just like yes, North America has a similarly small straight between Juno, Alaska and the area near Vladivostok, Russia; with raising and lowering waters from ice ages we have good explanation of how certain species of animals would have come from eastern Russia or places close in proximity. While that explains the introduction of a few things and particularly the native people, very few things European have a natural explanation for being here - including most obviously the bulk of Europeans, Asians, Latinos, and Africans now living here. I don't know what to make of the European honey bee in the UK because I don't know how long its on record. The US though, unless it was a combination of an insect stowaway on a ship in addition to human bee-keeping, I'd say that it was far more or almost exclusively the later.

Currently, most of our pest problems are man-made. That is because humans provide a convenient means of transferring both plant and animal life from one continent to the other. Ship's bilges are a veritable cornucopia of life.

ruveyn